It is often the case, particularly in automation environments, that installations are performed by a plurality of different contractors or companies or, alternatively, that the individual components are sourced from different companies. For example, a first company supplies automation terminals, a second company network components, and a third company office components and equipment.
In order to enable service technicians to access automation terminals, use is generally made of an access credential, such as a service certificate with corresponding private key or a user ID with associated password or similar identifying information. However, an access mechanism of this kind must first be installed or configured on a computer, such as a laptop of the service technician. In order to avoid long downtimes, which are costly and therefore critical particularly in the automation environment, it must be possible to set up such accesses as quickly as possible.
It becomes problematic when, as described previously, a plurality of companies work in cooperation and different entities are involved in a fault or service situation that is summed up by the term “failure”. Thus, it is possible, for example, for a service technician to seek access to automation terminals from a distance by remote access, but in order to do so must first connect to the network through, for example, a virtual private network (VPN) tunnel. If the service technician has not yet received a service certificate, which can certainly happen in the case of a relatively large pool of service technicians who are often responsible for supporting a plurality of companies, there is also a requirement for the service technician belonging to that company from which the network components are sourced.
It is therefore problematic to transmit a service certificate generated in this way to the service technician. Often the service technicians of the individual companies are separated from one another geographically, because it is known that most issues can be resolved by remote access. A plaintext transmission of the service certificate over the Internet is not advisable for security reasons. For a transmission by encrypted email, there is already a requirement for a shared public key infrastructure (PKI), which in turn is often too costly and complicated.
In order to circumvent these problems, to some extent it is necessary in the prior art techniques either for the service technicians to have all the service certificates of all the companies that are to be supported installed on their computers, or else to generate a service certificate on a “just in time” basis and to pass the generated service certificate to the appropriate service technician, such as by a data medium, or a Universal Serial Bus (USB) memory stick for example.